by Isabel Wolff
When my mother, Peter, and I reached our new home, the woman that we’d spoken to in the morning told us that her name was Kirsten, and that she’d been here in Bloemencamp for a year.
“Could you tell me where the school is?” my mother asked her.
“School?” Kirsten roared with laughter. “There’s no school! The Japs have forbidden education.”
“I see.” Mum looked at Peter and me. “Then I’ll just teach you myself.”
“Oh, you won’t be up to it,” Kirsten said. “You’ll be too tired.”
Mum bristled. “I shall be fine, thank you.”
“You won’t,” Kirsten insisted. “You’ll be exhausted.” My mother bit her lip but didn’t reply. I could see that she didn’t much like Kirsten.
The next day Mum was assigned work, as a “furniture lady.” Her job was to haul furniture out of abandoned houses and load it onto a two-wheeled wooden cart that would normally be pulled by a horse or a buffalo. Once the cupboards, tables, and chairs were piled high, my mother, along with Kirsten and a woman called Loes, had to pull the cart to another, already emptied house, and carry in the furniture to be stored there ready for any Japanese people to use in the future.
Within a week of starting this, my mother was noticeably thinner, her face and shins bruised from the heavy work. At the end of each day she would cook for us on the Anglo, but after that, just as Kirsten had predicted, she was too weary to do anything but sleep.
As I was ten, I was made to do chores. Some girls my age had to look after the babies and younger children while their mothers worked, or they had to sweep the streets or sort through the huge pile of rubbish by the gate. I was told that I would be pulling up weeds. This wasn’t easy, as the ground was baked hard and we had to watch out for scorpions. We weren’t allowed to kneel but had to squat on our haunches, which was very uncomfortable. Greta was doing this work too, a few yards from where I was working. One day I saw her succumb to the desire to kneel down. Within seconds a soldier had run over to her, grabbed her by the arm, and yanked her upright. I thought that he’d make her squat down again; instead, he raised his hand and struck her on the cheek. Instinctively, she turned her head and received a second blow on that side of her face. She fell to her knees, then was jerked upright and slapped again. I scrambled to my feet and ran to help her, but another soldier pushed me down, his face twisted with fury.
That night I told my mother what I’d seen.
She closed her eyes for a moment. “Poor Greta,” she murmured. “Poor little girl.”
“But why did that soldier hit her? He didn’t have to hit her, did he?”
My mother explained that Japanese soldiers despised prisoners because they themselves would rather commit suicide than suffer the dishonor of surrender. So, to them, European women prisoners were beneath contempt, and they hated having to guard us. To make themselves feel better, they vented their rage and frustration on us.
“So, in order not to be hurt by them, we must do whatever they say,” Mum concluded. “We must always bow to them, at once, and never look them in the eye. Do you both understand?” We nodded solemnly.
As the days passed, Mum worried about Peter, who was eight, being left alone while she and I worked. She didn’t want him running around the camp, like some of the other boys did, for fear he’d get into trouble with the soldiers. So Mum asked a woman called Ina, who was in her sixties and therefore exempt from work, to look after him. Ina was tall and thin, with hooded eyes, high cheekbones, and a curved nose; she reminded me of the eagle that we’d seen at the zoo. She’d never had children, but she looked after Peter very well. She cooked his food rations, played chess with him, and got him to write his numbers and letters using a stick in the dirt. Whenever she did this she would have to pretend that they were just chatting, because if it had looked as though a lesson was going on, she would have been beaten. In return for her care of Peter, Ina got items of my mother’s clothing.
“Why does Ina want your clothes?” I asked Mum. “She’s much taller than you are; they’ll never fit her.” Mum replied that Ina didn’t want to wear the clothes, only to barter them with the locals. At that time the Japanese still tolerated gedekking; crawling under the fence to trade money or jewelry for food or medicine with the people outside.
“Why doesn’t Ina barter her own things?” I demanded. My mother answered that Ina had very few possessions, as she’d already been in two other camps, and so most of what she’d had to start with was gone. “But why do the locals want our old clothes?” Mum explained that throughout Java the supply of cotton had dried up, and so the camp inmates traded their garments with the local people for food—a hanky would fetch one egg, a blouse six eggs or a “hand” of bananas. A dress would fetch ten eggs.
“Don’t ever give Ina my silk dress,” I told my mother. “Or Peter’s jacket.”
“I won’t,” she promised, “because I know you’re going to need them.”
As time went on, we got to know the people in “our” house, all except for a woman called Marjolein, who spoke to no one.
“Why doesn’t she speak to anyone?” my mother asked Kirsten.
“Because it’s her house,” Kirsten replied. “She loathes having to share it with thirty strangers; can’t say I blame her.”
Many of the families had been in more than one camp; some had been in Solo and De Wijk in the east, others had been in Muntilan and Ambarawa, in Central Java.
“The Japs are moving everyone westward,” Kirsten remarked.
“Why?” my mother asked.
“They’re herding us into one big ghetto,” Kirsten answered, “to make it easier to control us. That’s why it’s so crowded.”
Every day more trucks arrived, loaded with women and children. We recognized some from the other plantations, and there were more pupils from my school.
One day, to my joy, I saw Corrie van der Velden getting off a truck with her mother and her twin sisters, who by then were two and a half. They were allocated a room in our house, in the pavilion, and we were so glad to see them, though the twins cried a lot, which made sleeping—never easy—harder than usual. Corrie told me that they had been held in another camp, Karees, for the past year, in southeastern Bandung. They’d been in a house with twenty others, and had lived in the garage. “But now the camp’s being cleared,” Corrie explained, “so they’ve brought us here.” Her father, she added, was in Tjimahi. She had last glimpsed him sitting blindfolded, in the back of a truck, with the rest of his regiment. It had been a shock, she said, to see him like that. Had my own father been blindfolded? I tried to push the awful thought out of my mind.
What I remember most about the house on Orchideelaan was the noise. Day and night we heard the constant mumble of people talking, arguing, shouting, and weeping. One woman sneezed a lot—it sounded like a pistol being fired. Ina was always reading aloud from her Bible—to comfort us, she said, though I found it annoying and upsetting. But the worst thing was hearing babies cry. Their mothers were often too exhausted to comfort them, and too undernourished to be able to breastfeed them.
At that time everyone did their own cooking, using the rations that were provided, as well as food that could be bought from a shop called a toko that each family could go to on one day per month. When it was our turn, Peter and I would go there with our mother, but the toko had very little on sale and what there was was very expensive. Dutch money had been banned and replaced with Japanese “guilders,” which were worth far less; worse, the quantities that we could buy were tiny: a teaspoon of salt, a few grams of sugar or bread; a single papaya.
A few weeks after we’d arrived, soldiers burst into the house and took away our stoves. Then the gas supply was shut off, and kitchens were turned into bedrooms to accommodate yet more prisoners. The toko was closed. Now we all had to collect our food from the dapur, a central kitchen that was just a bamboo shed with old oil drums serving as massive saucepans. These were suspended over open fires and we
re lifted off them by two of the teenage boys using wooden poles. You had to stand in line with your pans to receive some watery soup, one spoon of horribly starchy rice with a tiny bit of meat and a sliver of onion or carrot stirred into it. There’d be half a slice of rubbery bread, and occasionally an egg or a banana, though these treats would have to be shared between three or four mouths. But even these meager rations were dwindling, and people were getting thinner, though the soldiers always looked well fed.
At tenko one morning the commandant informed us that in order to supplement the rations, we now had to grow our own food. We were given spinach and tomato seeds and our back garden was divided into ten sections, one for each family. It was the dry season, and the ground was bone hard. I remember watching Corrie’s mother struggling to break the baked soil with a pickaxe that was nearly as big as she was, while the twins and Corrie napped inside, watched over by Ina, who had taken on the role of benign aunt.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Van der Velden?” I asked. “Can I help you?”
“That’s kind, Klara.” Mrs. Van der Velden leaned on the pickaxe, out of breath. “But you’re far too young to do this sort of work.” She smiled. “And you don’t have to call me Mrs. Van der Velden. Kate will do just fine.”
My mother and Kirsten both helped Kate, and soon the rock-hard earth was dug over and watered and we were able to plant the seeds. They grew well, but we had to watch the plants at night because if we didn’t, people would steal them.
One guard stole in broad daylight. Everyone called him Johnny Tomato, and he’d ride around the camp on his bike, which was too small for him, his neckcloth flapping. If he spotted a ripe tomato, he’d get off his bike, pick it, then eat it right there on the spot. Once I saw him doing this at the house opposite ours; then, just as he was about to get back onto his bike, he stopped. As he stared down the street I followed his gaze and saw Marjolein, her head drooping with exhaustion as she returned from her shift in the dapur. Suddenly she looked up, stopped, and bowed. Perhaps she bowed a few seconds too late, or perhaps Johnny was just in a bad mood, but he threw his bike down, ran up to her, and started screaming at her in an enraged staccato that bounced off the walls. Then, to my horror, he took off his rifle and struck her with the butt; then he hit her again, and now he was pounding her shoulders and back, until she lay in the dust, her arms curled round her head. Then, as Kirsten and I rushed to help her, Johnny climbed back onto his bicycle and pedaled away.
We saw so many women and girls being hit that it became the norm. Slapping was the preferred way; the soldiers would strike first with the flat of the hand, then the back of the hand, then the flat again, snorting with the effort. Slap, slap, slap! Some liked to kick, or chop or punch. Others were more cunning, jabbing their fingers into soft parts with agonizing precision. A few, like Johnny Tomato, used their rifles, breaking collarbones and ribs or knocking out teeth.
My mother feared that being exposed to such violence would affect Peter and me. She worried that it would make us hate the Japanese.
“Why shouldn’t we hate them?” Peter demanded. “They’re horrible to us.”
“I don’t want you to hate anyone,” my mother replied. “Hatred is destroying the whole world.”
Not long after this, one of the twins, Sofie, became ill with dysentery. There was no hospital, and Kate was frantic. One morning I saw her run outside holding Sofie. She stopped two soldiers who’d been passing the house. Still cradling Sofie, she bowed, then implored them to get medicine for her “very sick child.”
“Imatin,” she said. “I need Imatin for my baby.”
The first soldier stared at her, then shook his head. Kate fell to her knees, still clutching the little girl, and begged him to help. But the pair just shrugged, then walked on. Kate sobbed as she carried Sofie inside.
That night my mother and I were woken by footsteps on the émpér that ran along the side of the house. We pulled back our kelambus and saw, standing by the open window, the second soldier. Without speaking, he handed my mother a small brown bottle; she looked at the label, then ran with it to Kate, who let out a cry of joy.
“You see,” my mother said triumphantly to Peter and me once Sofie had recovered. “That just proves that there’s good and bad in everyone; we must never forget that.”
My mother had said that running the plantation on her own had been too hard; but life in Bloemencamp was far worse. Peter and I hated having to see her doing such backbreaking work; we hated being hungry all the time. We loathed being crammed into such a confined space, with so many others that you could hear every cough, snore, and burp. I couldn’t bear the filth, the dreadful food, or the utter boredom. But what I hated, more than anything else, was tenko. Tenko was hell.
Morning and night we’d have to stand there as the soldiers counted us in our rows, shouting out the numbers:
Ichi! Ni! San! Shi! Go! Roku! Shichi! Hachi! Kyuu! Ju!
If they made a mistake, which they nearly always did, they’d go back and start all over again. There’d be people groaning and crying and leaning on one another, then they’d jerk straight up to bow as the commandant would stride past. We’d have to listen to him ranting at us, that we had been defeated and must therefore be obedient, polite, and grateful for the “hospitality” and “protection” that we were being given. As if this wasn’t enough, it was made far worse by the soldiers’ always finding someone to pick on. It could be for anything. Once they picked on Greta’s grandmother, Mrs. Moonen. Her mouth lifted up a little on one side; perhaps she’d had a stroke, I don’t know, but she was standing at the front when the commandant suddenly seemed to notice her. He must have thought that she was laughing at him, because he barked an order at a guard and the next second she was being dragged off the field. The following morning I saw Greta winding a bloodied bandage around Mrs. Moonen’s shorn head.
Of the many punishments that the Japanese used, head shaving was the most common. It was done in public, very badly, and was humiliating. Most would just tie a scarf around their head and carry on. Often, other women would cut off bits of their own hair and glue it to the front of the shaved woman’s scarf. My mother had done this so often that her once luxuriantly long hair now barely reached her collar.
“Why don’t we just escape?” Peter suggested one morning.
“Why don’t we?” I agreed. “After all, there are thousands of us, and just a few of them.”
“But they have guns and bayonets,” my mother responded. “And they’d use them.”
“In any case,” added Kate, “it would be hard to hide. We’d soon be spotted, brought back, and probably executed. Don’t worry, darling,” she said to Corrie. “That’s not going to happen.”
“I shan’t try and escape,” my mother stated. “My priority is just to stay alive, for my children.”
“Exactly,” agreed Kate, “and I shall stay alive for my girls—even if it kills me!” she added with a grim laugh.
I remember how painfully slowly time went by. We lost all track of it, though my mother tried to keep count of the passing weeks and months by making a daily mark on the wall. Our main aim was not to be noticed by the guards, so that we wouldn’t be punished. So during tenko I’d stand there, my face a mask, thinking about my father, and about the plantation, and about Ferdi and Sweetie and about how much I’d like to eat a mango, barely listening to the commandant ranting away. Then, during one tenko, after we’d been in Bloemencamp for about a year, I heard the interpreter announce that we were to be moved. A murmur of surprise rippled through the lines. My mother whispered to Peter and me that we were going to another camp, called Tjihapit. Then the interpreter raised her megaphone again, and told us that we were to go and pack immediately. We were to bring whatever we could carry, but were not to try to smuggle in any “forbidden items.” Our bags would be searched at the gate.
Back in the house, we all discussed what was forbidden.
“Anything Dutch,” said Kirsten. “That means no Du
tch money—notes or coins—or anything with an image of Queen Wilhelmina on it.”
“Nothing orange,” Ina added, “although …” She lifted up her dress to reveal an orange ribbon sewn along the hem of her pants. She grinned. “Like my royal knickers?”
“They’re lovely,” said Loes. “At tenko I tie a piece of orange wool to one of my toes so that I feel I’m bowing to Holland, not to the rotten Japs.”
“No Dutch flags,” Kirsten went on as she packed her suitcase. “No radio parts,” she added in a singsong voice. “No scissors or knives or—even more dangerous—books!”
This grieved my mother, as reading was, as she often put it, a way of “restoring” herself at the end of each day. But we had to leave our books piled up in the front gardens to be collected and burned; not even Bibles were allowed. Ina beckoned to me and opened her jacket; hidden inside the lining were a few pages that she said she’d torn out of her Old Testament. “A few of my favorite psalms,” she whispered, then put her finger to her lips.
“No paper or pens,” Kirsten intoned as she packed her bag. “No playing cards, and no board games.”
My mother turned to Peter. “You’ll have to leave Jaya’s chess set behind.”
“But I said I’d bring it back to him! I can’t leave it!” His eyes had filled. “I can’t, Mummy.”
“You’ll have to, Pietje,” she said. “We can’t risk them finding it.”
“Because if they did,” I said crossly, “it’s Mummy that they’d punish, not you. Do you want that?”
My mother wiped away his tears. “After the war I’ll buy Jaya a beautiful new chess set for you to give him.”
Peter swallowed. “Do you promise?”
“I do. I’ll get him one that’s even nicer.”
This seemed to cheer Peter. “He’s always wanted one made of onyx and marble.”
Mum smiled. “Then that’s what he’ll have. I’ll get him the most beautiful onyx and marble chess set that I can find. This is my solemn promise to you, darling.”
